


The Rules of Engagement

by GoneGravitas (AntiGravitas)



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 19:56:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20069701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntiGravitas/pseuds/GoneGravitas
Summary: There are rules to good business, just as there are rules for life and rules for the living of it.Lazard Deusericus likes to think he understands them all, until the day that he doesn't.





	The Rules of Engagement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyKF](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyKF/gifts).

> To answer the request, "Fic exploring the Slums/Plate duality of Lazard Deusericus' life. Canon says that Lazard grew up in the slums. How does that affect him, physically, mentally and emotionally? He plays the part of an upper-plate aristocrat as the Director of SOLDIER... does he ever let that go and go back to his roots?"

> **Company values** are the fundamental beliefs upon which a company bases its day to day behaviour. These values apply not only to the actions of the company itself, but also to each and every employee within that company. Here at Shinra Inc we believe that a solid set of core values will allow us to thrive as both a business and as a corporate family. Adherence to the guiding principles laid out in the document below will ensure the success of not only Shinra Inc, but also that of each individual employee. 
> 
> _ \- Excerpted from the Employee Welcome Pack y1999 edition. _

  * ****Do your best and become the best!****

Someone once told him that Shinra base their sworn corporate values on the ancient laws of war, but although he can well believe it, over the years HR have molded the propaganda into something more appropriate, smoothing out the sharper edges until the aggression of sword and lance has become the acceptable brutality of neatly pressed shirt and company-issued security pass. 

Lazard Deusericus has no clear memory of the day he first decided he would join Shinra. Instead he remembers the pervasive understanding in the slums that the Company was the only way out. Your future, your past, all these belonged to Shinra. The traditions of your family, the life of under-plate gloom and poverty, hunger and threat, even the people you mingled with - all these things were shaped and controlled, indebted or bound or enslaved to the hulking presence of chrome and mako that crouched like a beast over the entire city. Childhood for Lazard was a time of struggle, each and every day, although at the time he wasn’t aware that there could be any other way.

He has a memory of his mother sitting by the light of a lamp in the single main room of their tiny apartment, slowly working down a column of numbers with a pen and calculator. Lazard had watched from the bedroom doorway, and he’d known even then that his mother was unusual. She was older than the mothers of the other kids his age, and she kept herself apart, proud and careful, with the kind of beauty that would have meant something in her younger years. 

He remembers that night not because it was particularly out of the ordinary, but in part because he'd known even back then it was only her rigorous accounting that had kept them in food and rent for all his then-short life. They may have been poor, but his mother had always put meals on the table and kept a roof over his head, things that some of his friends couldn’t always claim to possess. No, he remembers that night so clearly because it’s the first time he recalls having the thought that one day things would change. One day his mother wouldn’t have to scrimp and save to make ends meet. One day he’d be the one to put food on her table, to buy her a house of her own, to make that careful column of numbers something she would never have to look at again. He has only a vague understanding at that point of what it is to be rich, and so the house he envisions buying for her is full of light and warmth in the winter, and marked by the conspicuously absent scent of rotting refuse that permeated their own house throughout the long, muggy days of summer.

He takes that determination, that dream, with him throughout his teenage years. With the skills his mother imparts to him in reading and writing, and with the suit she buys him on his fifteenth birthday, the one that must have cost all their meagre savings, he goes to the recruitment centre to take the aptitude tests, and from there on out he never looks back.

The colourful posters in the testing room have one predominant slogan on them: Do your best and _ become _ the best! Lazard takes this encouragement to heart, and for the next six years he climbs his way up the ranks of Shinra, aiming ever for the top. He _ is _ the best, because he has the determination and the vision and the _ dream _ to make it work. Shinra is the future and Shinra is everything and Lazard Deusericus intends to take that success and make it work for him and everyone important to him.

If, during those early years, he ever notices that for him some things come easier than they do for everyone else, then he is perhaps too inexperienced or too naive to understand the significance of it. If the challenges that other people face on their rise through the ranks often fail to materialise for him, then he puts it down to his own skill, and sometimes his own good fortune, but mostly he attributes it to the firmly held belief that since he’s doing his best then all that he’s done will one day pay off.

Lazard has a dream and a belief and a goal. He has the aspirations of a street rat, but he has the determination of one too, and he intends to be the best he can for Shinra. It may seem like an odd loyalty for one brought up under the boot heel of such an organisation, but Lazard has a plan. He intends to make it big in the Company, and in doing so he’ll bring the Company’s strength back to the slums in a way no-one else ever has, and then one day they won’t be slums any more. One day they'll go back to being the charming, successful little town that all the oldsters speak of, the one that's slowly rotting away beneath the ever-broadening shadow of the city above.

Lazard knows, with all the burning passion of youth and the cold determination of someone who has no way to go but up, that he can be the one to do this. And if, when the Turks smile at him, there’s something cold and knowing in their eyes, then that’s just the way they look at everyone. Half of them were street rats too in their time, and Lazard is not afraid of his own kind.

  * ****Everyone has a part to play!****

Company policy decrees that all employees strive to meet a minimum standard of physical fitness. Of course these rules seem to apply more stringently the lower down the ranks a person is, but there are benefits to keeping to them. Lazard knows full well that it’s not always about what you can do that gets you places, but about what people think of you.

He’s never told anyone where he comes from. He was the only child from the slums that passed the aptitude tests that year, the only one for years that he knows of, and despite his belief that Shinra is the future he has no illusions about the reality of people’s prejudices. He might never deny his origins, but when he speaks of home and family, he paints a vague picture of a hard-working mother and a simple, good life. Translucent facts that he allows others to colour with their own interpretations and bias. 

The truth he keeps for himself, and by the time anyone of note might start asking he’s earning the type of salary that can buy his mother her own spacious apartment in a secure building on the upper plate. He moves her there without a twinge of guilt, but it’s not to say that he forgets where they both came from. 

Lazard remembers all too well the piercing, never-ending cold of winter in the draughty, damp apartment block they lived in. How in the coldest months they moved their beds into the main room and blocked that door off, because the bedroom’s thin wall faced the outside and the main room was closer to the centre of the building. He remembers the sweltering heat of the summer in a block with no air conditioning. He remembers the endless days of humidity and running through the streets with his friends, digging in the dump overspills for something interesting to sell or form into a legendary sword that would kill any monster. 

These days, amongst the bright, cool corridors of Shinra HQ, he visits the executive’s gym and on most visits finds himself more or less alone there. It doesn’t bother him. Lazard will not pretend that he doesn’t appreciate the finer things in life, with all the interest of a man who has worked hard to get them, and a part of that is keeping himself in good form as well. He may not be the best at the fitness regimes, and he’s certainly no SOLDIER, but these days he _ is _ their representative and that means something. Those men who give their everything to be something better, for their families, for themselves, for Shinra, they deserve a man who will do his utmost for them in return and a part of that is never cutting a corner out of laziness.

Besides which, Lazard may never have need of the strength to swing a sword, but that doesn’t mean he can let such things slide. It’s a different type of fighting in his role, but it’s no less bloody. For where the men he guides fight with muscle and steel, Lazard’s battles come as something more polite, and because when he fights he fights both for them and for Shinra, for the past and the future, for his mother and all the kids who come from the same shadows that he did, that fight is a hundred times more lethal.

Once, Lazard’s battleground had been the shifting slopes of the underplate dumps, a broken-rod sword in his hand. Now that battleground has grown to encompass the whole of Midgar, indeed the whole of the world. And he will not be found wanting.

  * ****Honesty and integrity will ensure success!****

Lazard was a clever boy, and he becomes a clever man. Life in the slums made him decisive and efficient, even if it somehow never managed to make him cynical. Still, he does not consider himself to be a foolish man, and he understands the value of knowing. A boy that knows when trouble is in the air, one who knows at what point venturing out might be like putting a match to the pockets of gas that collect in the most dangerous of the dumps. A boy who understands that people are fundamentally selfish and foolish and prone to taking the easy options, a boy such as that, if he is also observant, might find himself able to go far.

He begins collecting information on other people as soon as he enters corporate training at age sixteen. It’s not so much a calculated effort as a way of being that’s kept him alive for so long now that he knows no other way of existing. He picks up on the little things - the favourite place to sit, and the person whose jokes people always make sure to laugh at. The glances exchanged and between whom, and the things that people don’t say as much as the things they do.

Later on in his career he uses these webs of intrigue to help himself along, and it’s not so much cheating as understanding the system and surely no-one can fault a man for his insight. He signs up with the Military branch as a data analyst, then shunts sideways into Tactical Strategy and from there he goes up the managerial chain until he reaches the heady heights of his current position, Director of SOLDIER, and it’s because he cares, he _ truly cares _ about the men and women of the division that he gets to where he is today. They trust him because he knows them and trusts them in return and together they’re something unstoppable, for Shinra and for each other.

Lazard looks down from near the very top of the pile and what he sees makes him smile grimly. It’s been a very long way to the top, and as he’s made his way there he’s seen things that might make even the most cynical of people pause in shock. He’s seen the greed and the backstabbing and the rivalries, and he’s played them all off against each other. Little outbursts of gang warfare where the gangsters dress up in fine suits and drink thirty year old bottles of port after dinner and don’t give a damn for anyone but themselves. Yes, Lazard has looked down from the top and seen the people below, slowly being crushed beneath the enormous weight of the company and the hateful greed of its uppermost echelons, and it’s compounded in him the need for change. The need to drive that change, to lead from the front in a better direction. Not yet though. Breaking cover too soon is a sure fire way to be shot down in ignominy.

He can’t say quite what it is that makes him start to wonder about Hollander. It’s something he hears perhaps, or something he sees in a report, or maybe it’s the man’s tone of voice during one of the President’s board meetings. Something strikes him as subtly _ off, _ as though there’s more below the surface than there appears to be. Of course, everyone’s hiding something and that’s hardly a crime, but some intuition tells Lazard that with Hollander there’s more than just the usual mistresses or drug dependencies or gambling debts. 

He starts to research, and to his surprise finds himself having to manoeuvre around the Turks, particularly Tseng. That in itself isn’t all that unusual, after all Hollander is one of the big shot scientists in the company, but it’s certainly _ interesting. _The Turks are very good at what they do, but Lazard is better. After all, half that motley group of razor-toothed attack dogs are slum kids too, and Lazard knows how to be as brutal and bloodily efficient as he needs to be to get what he wants. Figuratively speaking of course. 

When he does find the details of Hollander’s file, it’s not because he pays someone to look the other way, not because he threatens or bribes them, but because he knows the system so well, and because he doesn’t need to do any of those things to achieve his goals. All he needs to do is drop an innocent word here, understand the corner-cutting nature of humans in general, and slide his way between the gaps in the system only someone in his position could ever know about. 

Lazard finds out all manner of things on Hollander that make him wonder. And that there is the first time in his illustrious career that the doubt sets in.

  * ****Happy workers are good workers!****

There’s a look in Sephiroth’s eyes that Lazard cannot quite read. It’s been several years now since he’s been working with SOLDIER, longer than he perhaps cares to admit, and certainly more years than it feels like. In all that time he’s never felt able to fully pin down the thought processes that go on behind the General’s unreadable eyes. There’s something there though, something behind the dutiful soldier, the loyal general, the finely honed killing machine. He’s a strange one, is Sephiroth, just like all the high-ranked SOLDIERS are - in their own ways.

It’s not until he rises high in the administrative ranks of SOLDIER that Lazard gains personal face-to-face access to the SOLDIER First Class group. If they’re to accept and trust him as their Director - their guide, mentor and representative in the political battlefield - then they have to get to know him. And as with anyone, true respect takes time, and trust takes even longer.

The lower ranked SOLDIERs are all more or less what you would expect from enhanced fighting men. They’re young, often brash, certainly full of themselves. There’s not a great deal of difference between them and the average young man, even if their eyes do gleam a little in the right light. But the further up the ranks you go, the more likely the SOLDIER is to have received special treatments, and the further away from the norm they are.

Lazard knows all this, he understands the reasons for it and accepts the necessity. He’s also not immune to a certain sense of, not quite fear, not quite wonder. A fascination with them perhaps that he’s careful to mask. They’re his men to look after, and although they’re company assets they’re still people. 

Still, there are times when they do something, or say something, or simply don’t do what an average human would that the differences become striking. When Angeal looks out from the window of the meeting room, fifty-one floors up and tells Lazard that he can see his secretary coming back from lunch in the crowds below and Lazard knows he wouldn’t be able to see the man even if he were pointed out to him. Or when Genesis flicks his gaze quickly down a sixty page mission brief and parrots every detail back at them with nothing but a bored expression on his face. Or when Lazard knocks over a coffee mug and without seeming to look Sephiroth reaches out, catches it in the air, and sets it back on the table, not pausing in his report for even a second.

It’s the little things, as well as the big. 

And it’s also in the silences and the words the three of them don’t speak to one another that the real mystery lies. 

Sephiroth is staring with fixed intensity at the datapad in his hands. It contains a briefing on an insurrectionist group in the distant outskirts of Wutai, one whose leader seems to believe that taking up with Shinra will allow him to rise to a position of power once the company has finalised their foothold in that territory. Lazard can see Sephiroth’s clever mind turning the mission briefing over, seeing, as Lazard knows he will, what all the political ramifications of lending their assistance to this group might be. Behind them Genesis strides slowly around Lazard’s office, his own datapad in one hand while he gestures with the other to illustrate his words. 

“And what will this _ General Wu _ \- he fancies himself a general, Sephiroth, you should watch out- what does he expect us to give him in return for his cooperation? Are we to fight his war for him, which I might add we’re _ already doing _ if you think about it? Are we supposed to do this out of the goodness of our hearts? Because if so I think maybe he misunderstands Shinra on a fundamental level, wouldn’t you say?”

Sephiroth ignores him, but Angeal’s eyebrow twitches down into a frown, and he shakes his head, fingers tightening around his cardboard coffee mug. Angeal doesn’t like it when Genesis calls into question the honour of Shinra, idealist that he is, and Lazard can understand that. 

“We’re here to enforce Shinra’s policies where appropriate, Genesis,” Angeal says. “We have to consider all possibilities with a clear head and enact the ones that lead to the minimum strife.”

“Oh, do we now?” Genesis smiles, and it’s a dangerous thing, intended to bait and provoke.

It goes on like this for several minutes, and Lazard lets them do it. He knows full well that between them they’ll work out their differences, Angeal and Genesis settling into that old pattern of bickering, of give and take, or taunt and mollify, with Sephiroth cool and distant on the outside. There’s something going on there between the three of them, some dynamic Lazard doesn’t quite understand, but it has something to do with competitiveness, and a lot to do with loneliness. The three of them may not consider him their friend as they do one another, but this outside position gives Lazard more insight into their group than perhaps they realise. 

He sees how Genesis riles up Angeal, but watches Sephiroth for his reaction. How Sephiroth ignores him but is fully aware of every word and every look sent his way. How Angeal sweats and tries to draw Genesis’ fire onto him in an attempt to head off a fight, and Lazard wonders what it is that’s happened in private to make Angeal so afraid. What it is that puts the anger and the pain into Genesis, and why it is that Sephiroth, for all that he has these two at his side, still seems so deeply, unreachably lonely.

They’re unhappy, each of them in their own way, and there’s nothing Lazard knows how to do, nothing he knows to say, that might penetrate their combined armour of arrogance, self-reliance and pride, nothing that might help him reach them.

He watches them sparring verbally, and once they’re gone on their way, mission briefing debated and more or less settled, he leans back in his chair and wonders again how he can help them. His mind drifts back to Hollander and what his files had said, and, more to the point, the things that hadn’t been in them.

Lazard has been with Shinra for a long time now, and he understands the way of the company and its dirty secrets, and so he knows that it’s the things that don’t get said, the things that are conspicuous for their absence, that are the most important signifiers.

It’s time, he thinks, to go and see Hollander.

  * ****Dream big!****

There’s a man in the corner of the bar, wearing a faded shirt and dusty work trousers. He has a hood pulled up over his head, which isn’t unusual down this way, because this is the type of bar where people come not to be seen, but to be forgotten and to forget. There’s no besuited bouncer on the door to this establishment, and no polished chrome tables, and certainly only the foolish would ever try anything left out on the bar to mimic complementary finger foods. There’s just Jo with her heavy iron rod tucked up against her leg beneath the table, and the sputtering, inconsistent flicker of the neon sign outside that declares the place to be a source of some kind of alcohol, buyer beware.

The man in the corner doesn’t live around here. The work clothes he wears may not be expensive, but they’re certainly not patched enough to be genuine. Or perhaps they’re genuine in another part of Midgar, one that actually sees the sun some days and where work doesn’t always include grime the likes of which won’t ever wash out. Or maybe he’s something else entirely, a workman that carries a gun rather than a spanner, because sometimes they get that type down this way too.

Whatever he is, the man has been here for five hours now, and he’s not talked to anyone or looked at anyone save to order himself liquor. He’s been drinking a steady stream since he got here, pacing himself with all the experience of a hardened drinker, or a man out to drown his woes. Emilia has left him alone, because men like that, particularly the ones that might be carrying a gun, well, you just leave them to it and open the door for them once they decide to leave.

When, finally, he does leave, he goes out with the changing of the shift, when the plate above creaks and hisses with all the signs that the upside city is waking up for business. The rattling of the trains increases its frequency and the hum of the power lines shifts pitch as the rich and favoured get their mornings under way. After the man leaves, Emilia turns the sign on her door to closed, sliding home the bolts and latching the chains, calling a goodbye to Jo as her bouncer leaves via the back door. Then she puts her eye to the grille and watches the man make his way down the street, waiting to see where he goes.

If he’s one of the Company’s attack dogs then he doesn’t walk like one. He lacks the arrogance and the challenge to his steps, or the smirk hovering just at the corner of his mouth. He may dress a little too far towards new to really pass, but when he walks he walks like a local, and before he’s even out of sight he’s blended in with the crowds, sliding in amongst the busy slipstreams of the slum’s inhabitants, not so much keeping to their pace as living it like only a man born to such a life ever could. 

Emilia watches him, then she shakes her head, draws the grate back across the grille and forgets him.

Lazard can feel the liquor in his blood, making his body sing with it. His feet feel light, as though he could run the whole way back to his apartment on the upper plate, chase the trains and beat them, swift as a SOLDIER First Class. The very idea is ludicrous and it makes him laugh. But still, he feels it, that same invincibility, and it’s a belief born of knowing this place, of knowing the people and the battleground for what it is that gives him the confidence to walk a drunken route back to the station.

As he walks he thinks of all the things he learned from Hollander, of the way the man had leaned in intimately close, the rough growl of his voice and that garish, ugly t-shirt he wears - gods what bad taste the man has! But then all of it is in bad taste, isn’t it? The whole damned mess of it. All the world, all the delicate structures upon which Lazard has built the fundamentals of his belief system - all of them, just imaginary castles in the sky. His own personal day-dreams, believed so strongly he’d mistaken them for reality.

The thunderous roar of a train makes his teeth rattle in his head as it screams by above and for some reason it too makes him laugh. All this, built on the Company’s order, at Shinra’s behest. The tasteful beauty of above, holding its nose as it crouches blindly over the waste dumps below. Oh, there’s some kind of metaphor in there, some kind of irony perhaps that he’s too drunk to fully articulate, and he laughs instead, the sound lost beneath the rumble of the train’s wheels.

Lazard had a dream once. It was a dream that would have seen the world transformed into something new, something _ better. _In it, people who had been taken advantage of, never given a fair chance, would have been given a future. Something they’d deserved for years and been denied by the greed of the few. For a long time Lazard had thought he’d understood the depths of the Company’s crimes, of its greed and the blind eye it would turn to anyone that couldn’t line its pockets with gil. Lazard is no fool and he knows full well that the kind of life that exists above the plate can only be for the few, not the many. 

Lazard has loyalty. He likes to think of himself as an honest man, one who makes the system work for him in the interests of the greater good. One day, he will be able to take control, he’ll have the influence to put the loyalty he’s earned from Shinra to good use, to pay off the debt of another loyalty, the one that he has to the place and the people of his birth. One day, Shinra will work for him. Shinra will do what Shinra should always have done.

But now Lazard has seen even further, deeper into the depths of the Company’s depravity. He saw the cold ambition in Hollander’s eyes, was aware as the man waited for his reaction when he’d pulled out the DNA test and put it into Lazard’s hands. And at that moment it hadn’t been anything to do with Hollander’s petty rivals, or the squabbles between divisions for Lazard. It hadn’t even been about loyalty. He’d seen a secret even he, with all his years of careful observation, had been blind to.

Lazard turns his faces up to the drip of water, seeping down through the cracks from the world above the plate, and lets the coolness of it soothe away the heat burning in his skin. 

“Let me help you realise your goal,” he’d said softly, and although Hollander had grinned as though he’d won, Lazard had known that he was the one with the winning hand, just as he had been all along, even if he’d never even realised it.

Dream big! Or so the company likes to say. 

Lazard has dreams. Dreams so big that bringing them to fruition seems more like a task for a demi-god than a mere man. But that’s quite all right, because Lazard knows a few of them too. And after all, as he likes to think, unattainable dreams are the best kind. They give a man something to aim for, something to reach for, so that he can pull himself up from the mire of his beginnings and become something far greater than anyone could ever have known.

He fingers the heal materia in his pocket, letting it draw enough power from him to cast a small esuna and shudders as its effects wipe the alcohol from his bloodstream. Flicking the dirty water from his cheeks with the tips of his fingers, Lazard Deusericus squares his shoulders and returns home.


End file.
